The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 231

S.F. Sunday Examiner Chron Sunday, January 5, 1986 5 San Francisco Examiner 'Profile: research of staff lawyers for their decisions, assumed these young men were there to check on them. Bird has said she told her advance team to learn the functions of the offiees and workers and sess her own duties at the court. A secretary recalls standing by a stack of books, chatting with a researcher, hen they noticed one of Joseph R. Grodm Birth: Aug.

30, 1930, Oakland. Education: Undergraduate, UC-Berkeley; law school, Yale University; Ph.D. in economics, London School of Economics. Career: Private practice, specializing in labor law, San Francisco, 1955-72. Hastings School of the Law professor, 1972-79.

Member, state Agricultural Labor Relations Board, 1975:76. Justice, 1st District Court of Appeal, San Francisco, 1979-82. Appointed to the Supreme Court in 1982 by Gov. Brown. Important decisions: Wrote majority opinion that Boys' Club of Santa Cruz, as a public organization, could not bar females.

Also wrote the majority opinion which held that an employee who was harassed by her employer and then quit her job was entitled to unemployment benefits. Personal: He was the Northern California treasurer for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign in 19C8. He is an avid backpacker and was co-author, along with one of his two daughters, of a backpacker's guidebook. He lives in Berkeley with his wife, Janet. Quote: "I find I think best when I'm engaged in a dialogue with somebody rather than sitting in a monastic existence surrounded by law books, papers and briefs.

I find I don't function optimally in that kind of atmosphere." she with nearly nine years, he with 21. Few male judges would admit to sexism, but some of their reactions when Bird came on the court are difficult to explain without considering the gender of the new chief justice. Retired Judge Jerry Pacht of the Los Angeles County Superior Court recalls being in the judges' lounge there hen Bird's appointment was announced: "All these guys were complaining, 'Oh, she's got no judicial Then, when (University of California law professor) Frank Newman was appointed, I came into the lounge, and there wasn't a single word. He'd never been in a courtroom. His field was international law.

"Why? Because she was young and a woman. Half of it's unconscious." Never before has a chief justice's choice of clothing and hairstyle created so much interest and talk. Judges at the Supreme Court and Courts of Appeal took note when she started painting her toenails, speculating that she had a boyfriend. Some staffers at the court both men and women talk of her appearance with a brutality that seems to go beyond sexism. "I remember the first day she came to the court.

Her appearance was so shocking to us. She wore black pants and a flowing black mu-mu over the pants. We were all dressed well. She looked like a washerwoman," a former secretary said. Male suffers in those days called her "the jolly green giant" because of her large frame 5 feet 9 inches, 160 pounds and the green polyester pantsuits she wore.

Now, one of them remarks that she has changed her official portrait six times and says: "She looks great now slimmed down. She looks like a movie star." There is a sense of intense dislike in some of these comments. Even Bird has wondered in recent interviews whether she didn't spark such emotions by moving too fast Those early years at the court were "Hell on wheels," she has said. She came to the court with a governor's mandate for change and an inner clock that told her to move quickly. She worried that her life might be shortened by cancer and that her time at the court could be cut short by outside forces that were attacking her politically.

"I never was sure of how long I was going to be here, so I moved on a lot of reforms very quickly, and perhaps in retrospect it would have been better to have done that more slowly," she told The Examiner last fall A month before Bird came to the court, she sent in a transition team of four young lawyers so she could come on board running. Court workers, already concerned about Bird's public statements that Supreme Court justices relied too much on the writing and ent than just dogs It's something more than just having a pet." She doesn't watch much television, and reading is her work and no longer a pastime. "I like to have dinner with friends, and I do that quite often," she told an Examiner interviewer last fall. "I like to work out. I do have a place where I work out, but for security reasons I guess I can't even say that anymore.

I like to go to the movies. I like discussing them afterwards and figuring them out and what they're trying to say. I like to swim a lot. I don't have much of an opportunity to do that. I used to ride my bike.

I used to go places, like Hawaii and others. I used to travel a lot until i got into more public positions." She would still like to marry and have a family, she told The Examiner. "I think that's an important part of life." Still, she recognizes the difficulty: "It's very hard to date a chief justice, I would imagine, for a man. Much to my chagrin." ONE EPISODE ILLUSTRATES well the range of personal traits attributed to the chief justice by her friends and enemies. Bird added a separate, concurring opinion to a recent Supreme Court decision that banned discrimination against girls by the Santa Cruz Boys' Club.

She wrote with only one apparent purpose: To preserve in legal literature the dissenting opinion of 1st District Court of Appeal Justice Marcel Poche. "Justice Poche wrote an cxcel-lent dissenting opinion In most respects his analysis was identical to that of today's lead opinion," she wrote. "Indeed, this court granted a hearing largely due to the persuasive force of Justice Po( he's arguments. The inevitable but unfortunate consequence was to wipe out the published record of his excellent contribution." This is interesting, chiefly because Bird had threatened three years earlier to rule that Poche was unqualified to be a Court of Appeal presiding justice. Poche won't talk about what happened to him when he crossed Bird, but it is well known that he pays for it daily with a 100-mile commute.

Several other judges know the story in detail. Poche, Gov. Brown's former legislative secretary, lobbied for the creation of a new Court of Appeal district in San Jose. Bird lobbied against it. apparently for sound administrative reasons.

Critics of the California judiciary have agreed for years that there already were too many districts of the Court of Appeal, all autonomous, often creating divergent opinions on legal issues. Bird lost but took her revenge on Poche who then, as now, was a Court of Appeal justice in San Francisco. Poche wanted an appointment to the new court, hich was close to his home. The chief justice told Jerry Brown she would vote against me cniei young meu peei uig ire-tween the books, listening to us. I couldn't believe it.

Her people were lurking around. They weren't even clever about it. Just trying to pick up any scuttlebutt." Once at work. Bird forced radical shifts in personnel and procedures on the courts, institutions notorious for their adherence to tradition and resistance to change. Kleps was the first to sense the' force of the revolution to come.

For years, he had been the day-to-day boss of California's judiciary. Chief Justice Phil Gibson hired Kleps in 1961 as director of the Administrative Office of the Courts. The succeeding chiefs, Roger Traynor and Donald Wright, delegated to him more and more of their administrative powers. He took his cues from them, of course, but Kleps ran the engine. He supervised the hiring and firing of staff, the assignment of judges and the agenda for the Judicial Council, a constitutional body which sets policy for the stale courts.

His work had gained him a national reputation. So it seemed routine hen Kleps asked Bird to sign some documents delegating to him the same administrative powers he had held under Chief Justice Wright. Bird sent back a peremptory memo: "All delegations of authority, either verbal or in writing, granted to you by all former justices of the Supreme Court and the chairpersons of the Judicial Council are hereby canceled." Kleps quit six weeks after Bird arrived at the court. He had groomed Jon Smock of the Administrative Office of the Courts to be his successor. Instead, Bird insisted that the post go to Ralph Gampell, a lawyer with no experience in judicial administration who.

as president of the State Bar, had been instrumental in garnering the Bar's endorsement of her nomination. Smock quit after he returned from a vacation to find his desk moved out of his office, which had been occupied by Darrell Sackl, one of Bird's young lawyers. "If you were not really with her, if she didn 't think you were one of the team, you were out. They had to have confidence in you and your devotion to the chief justice rather than in your ideas and abilities." Richard A. Frank, retired deputy director of the Administrative Office of the Courts Please see rv Page 6 Jon Pevna, now associate dean at Golden Gate University Law School, worked for the state Judicial Council when Bird was appointed.

As chief justice, she would head the council and become his boss. Pevna likes to make jokes involving people's names. They're not very good ones. He used to say, for instance, that his boss Ralph Kleps had a daughter named Paper. Paper Kleps, get it? When Pevna heard the courts were to have a new boss named Rose Bird, he couldn't control himself.

He told people at the court they should put a sign on the private bathroom in the chief's chambers reading "Bird BatlL" He also suggested formation of a court baseball team called "Bird Brains." Not long after Bird arrived at the court, one of her young staffers came to Pevna 's office and said: "I hear you have been making fun of the chief justice." Pevna explained his penchant for puns. The staffer, according to Pevna, left him with a message that said, in essence: "You're either with us or against us." Those were not easy days for Bird. "When I first came to the court," she recalled in a 1984 interview with Working Woman magazine, "I don't think I fully appreciated what a difficult adjustment it was for my colleagues to accept a woman who was young enough to be their daughter as a symbol of authority." She had no experience as a judge, barely had enough time in as a practicing attorney to be eligible for the position of chief justice and was taking a job many in the legal community thought should have gone to Justice Stanley Mosk. He told friends he had been promised the job by Jerry Brown. Time seems to have erased most of the tension that once existed between Mosk and Bird.

Today, they are the senior judges on the court Poche's appointment, so the governor never offered it The only legal ground for such a vote would have been that Poche was not qualified. we jl ew New chemistry and new problems ai the high court B4 go around and I talk to people, and people say they're opposed to the chief justice. And I say, Many of them don't have a reason. Thosa who do and articulate it a. frequently not in a position to support it after a second analytical question.

"And so I conclude that there is something in the chemistry there that is highly emotional in the reaction people have with respect to the chief justice. Maybe social psychologists can answer what that is, but I don't think I can." Justice Joseph R. Grodin in an interview for this Examiner report HATEVER THE CHEM ISTRY, it was there from the start in the Supreme Court cham bers and in the bureaucracy that oversees the state court system..